rom the sun whenever it made the mistake of
being out.

On August the fourth he insisted that he was well and must go back home.
And, though to bring her attendance on him to an end was a grief, she
humbly admitted that he must be wanting younger company, and, after
one wistful attempt, made no further bones. The following day they
travelled.

On getting home he found that the police had been to see little Biddy
Tryst, who was to be called as a witness. Tod would take her over on the
morning of the trial. Derek did not wait for this, but on the day before
the assizes repacked his bag and went off to the Royal Charles Hostel at
Worcester. He slept not at all that night, and next morning was early
at the court, for Tryst's case would be the first. Anxiously he sat
watching all the queer and formal happenings that mark the initiation
of the higher justice--the assemblage of the gentlemen in wigs; the
sifting, shifting, settling of clerks, and ushers, solicitors, and the
public; the busy indifference, the cheerful professionalism of it all.
He saw little Mr. Pogram come in, more square and rubbery than ever, and
engage in conclave with one of the bewigged. The smiles, shrugs, even
the sharp expressions on that barrister's face; the way he stood,
twisting round, one hand wrapped in his gown, one foot on the bench
behind; it was all as if he had done it hundreds of times before and
cared not the snap of one of his thin, yellow fingers. Then there was a
sudden hush; the judge came in, bowed, and took his seat. And that, too,
seemed so professional. Haunted by the thought of him to whom this was
almost life and death, the boy was incapable of seeing how natural it
was that they should not all feel as he did.

The case was called and Tryst brought in. Derek had once more to undergo
the torture of those tragic eyes fixed on him. Round that heavy figure,
that mournful, half-brutal, and half-yearning face, the pleadings,
the questions, the answers buzzed, bringing out facts with damning
clearness, yet leaving the real story of that early morning as hidden as
if the court and all were but gibbering figures of air. The real story
of Tryst, heavy and distraught, rising and turning out from habit into
the early haze on the fields, where his daily work had lain, of Tryst
brooding, with the slow, the wrathful incoherence that centuries
of silence in those lonely fields had passed into the blood of his
forebears and himself. Brooding,